Beneath the Cypress Shadows: A Collection of Southern Gothic Horror Stories
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Authors
Sherrod, Tabitha Kristina
Issue Date
2024-12-19
Type
Thesis
Language
en_US
Keywords
School of Letters , School of Letters Thesis 2024 , University of the South, southern gothic, horror, short story collection, fiction
Alternative Title
Abstract
Beneath the Cypress Shadows was born from a desire to create a collection of Southern Gothic stories that explore where horror stems from in our lives. Bookended with two flash fiction pieces (“Regeneration” and “Renewal”) set in a West Tennessee swamp containing a lone tree at its center that, in the real world, exists only a few miles from my house, these stories bring into question if we are the creators of our own horrors. Purposefully setting almost every story in fictional small towns that resemble many of ours in West Tennessee, I wanted to create a sense of home sometimes being the birth of many of our own horrors. Besides answering the question of horror and its development in the characters of these stories, this collection was also written as an outlet for my own personal struggles through major life changes that I was going through while writing many of the stories you read here. Deaths, divorce, career changes, and other twists and turns in my life helped me create characters that, although faced with horrors, creatures, demons, dismal settings, and more, could somehow reach readers somewhere in their own lives and their own horrors. I believe we write to reveal our own lives in a way that we can dissect or perhaps hide away the parts of us we don’t want to reveal or the parts that we want to pull out and lay bare to heal ourselves. It is my hope that through this collection, through the horrors we face in our lives, somehow a hidden healing emerges in its own way by telling ourselves the stories we must in order that we begin to change our lives.
Description
Citation
Publisher
University of the South